The Politics of the Family: And Other Essays (Selected Works of R.D. Laing, 5)

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R D Laing: Selected Works Volwne 5

The Politics of the Family and Other Essays

RDLaing

London and New York

First published 1969 by Tavistock Publications Limited

Reprinted 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Stt·eet, New York, NY 10001

© 1969. 1971 The R D Laing Trust

This is a reprint of the 1971 edition Printed and bound in Great Dritain by Pear Tree Image Processing Limited. Stevenage. Hcrts SGl 2PT

AU rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utili8ed in any fonn or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying nnd recording, or in any infonnarion storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Dat(l

ISBN 0-415-19822-4

Contents Page vii

Preface PART I The Family and the 'Family'

3

Intervention in Social Situations

21

The Study of Family and Social Contexts in Relation to 'Schizophrenia,

43

PART II

The Politics of the Family ltttroduciion The Family and ltwaliJatiott Family Scenarios Operations Rules and Metamles lvfapping

6j

67 77

89 103

117

Bibliography

IZS

Index

129

Preface

Th.is oook com..ists of rcvislotl.S of talks

(~xcept the first

chapter) given in r¢7-68 on diverse occasions. I have eliminated many redundancies, leaving, I hope, nottoo many, and tidied up the English. The ftrst chapter is virtually rewritten. Otherwise they are as they were: intended, then and now, to evoke questions rather than to provide answers. From r9(ii to 1967 my studies of families were supported by FeJlowsh.ips from the Foundations Fw1d for Research in Psychiatry (Grant No 64-297) and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

LmdOtt, March 1971

R. D. Laing

LAWS I assuming that you have reasonably good laws, one of the best of them will be the law forbidding any young men to enquire which of them are right or wrong; but with one mouth and one voice they must all agree that the Jaws are all good, for they come from God; and any one who says the contrary is not to be listened to. But an old man who remarks any defect in your laws may communicate his observation to a ruler or to an equal in years when no young man is present.

A TIIENI AN: •••

CLEIN A S:

Exactly so, Stranger; and like a diviner, although not there at the time, you seem to me quite to have hit the meaning of the legislator . • .

we may observe that any speculation about laws turns almost entirely on pleasure and pain. both in states and in individuals •••

AT HENIA!Il: •••

LAWS IV we must ••. regulateourcitiesandhouses according to law, mea11ing by the very term •Jaw', the distribution of mind.

ATHENIAN: •••

Plato, Lmt'S Uowett translation)

Part I Essays

The Family and the ' Family' 1 W c speak of families as though we all knew what families are. We identify, as families, networks of people whq live toged1er over periods of time, who have ties of marriage and kinshlp to one another. The more one studies family dynam..ics, the more unclear one becomes as to the ways family dynamics compare and contrast with the dynamics of other groups not called families, let alone the ways families themselves differ. As with dynamics, so with structure (patterns, more stable and enduring than others): again, comparisons and generalizations must be vecy tentative. The dynamics ant! structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups caJled families in odter places and times. The relevance of the dynamics and structure of the family to the formation of personality is unlikely to be constant in different societies. or even in our own. The family here discussed is the family of origin transformed by internalization, partitioning, and other operations, into the 'fatnily'2 and mapped back onto the family and elsewhere. It is to the relation between the observable Revised from 'Individual and Famil}' Structure' in Lom:1s (1967). Single inverted. commas arc wed wben it is necessary to make clear that it is the internalized family that i!l. in qW'!srion. 1

11

3

ESSAYS

structures of the family and the structures that endure as part of the 'family' as a set of relations and operations between them that this chapter is addressed. THE FAMILY AS FANTASY

Thefamily as a system is internalized. Relations and operations between elemet1ts and sets of elements are internalized, not elements in isolation. Elements may be persons~ things, or part-objects. Parents are internalized as dose or apart, together or separate, near or distant, loving, fighting, etc., each other and sel£ Mother and father may be merged as a sort of fused parental matrix, or be broken dov..-n into segments that transect the usual personal partitions. Their sexual relation as envisaged by the child holds a sort of nuclear position in every internal 'family'. Members of the family may feel more or less in or out of any part or whole of the family, according as they feel themselves to have the family inside themselves and to be inside the set of rdations characterizing the internal family of other members of the family. The family as internalized is a space-time system. What is internalized as 'near' or 'far', 'together' or 'divorced', are n()t only spatial relations~ A tempera/ sequence is always present. If I thlnk of others as together with me, and yet others ~s not together with me, I have undertaken two acts of synthesis, resulting in we and tlu:m. The family i:s a common we, in contrast to them outside the family. But, in addition, there are the subgroups within the family, we, me, you, them, we parents, those children, we children, mother-and-child we, and father as him, and so on. When I identify myse]f as one of us, I expect you to do likewise. When there are three, you

4

THE FAMILY AND THI!

FAMILY

and he or she and me, each becomes one of us. In such a family we, each of tJs, recognize(s) not only his or her own family synthesis, but expects a comparable family synthrsis to exist in you, him, or her also. My 'family' comprises his or hers, is his and mine, hers and mine. The 'family' is no simple social object, shared by its members. The 'family' to each of its members is no objective set of relations. It e:xists in each of the elements in it, and rwwhere else. & Sartre would say, the family is united by the reciprocal internalization by each (whose token of membership is precisely this interiorized1 fami]y) ofeach other~s jnremalization. The unity of the family is in the interior of each synthesis and each synthesis is bowtd by reciprocal interiority with each other's internalization of each other's interiorization . .. Unification by co-inherence occurs in the Christian experience of being one 'in' Cluist. Co-inherence pervaded. the Nazi mystique of the Country and the Party. We feel oursdvcs to be One in so far as each of us has inside himself a presence common to all brothers and :sisters in Christ, in the Party, or in the family. 11 What function has 'the family' in terms of tbe relationsl1ip of members of the family? The 'family', the family as a fantasy structure, entails a type of relationship between family members of a different order from the relationships of those who do not share that

'family' inside each other. 1 Interiorize and intedorization are used synouyn1ously witll internalize and internalization.. ! I mean ro make only the most abstract of comparisons between groul?s based on such co-inherence. for a discussion of co-inherence from a Christian po.int of view, see Williams (1950).

5

ESSAYS

The 'family' is not an introjectcd object, but an introjected set of relations. The 'family', as an internal system one is inside, may not be de.uly differentiated from other such systems, to which one can give only such very inadequate names as 'womb'. 'breast', 'mother's bodyt, and so forth. It may be felt to be alive, dying or dead, an animal, a machine, ofien a human protective or destructive container like the facehouse- bodies children draw. This is a set of elements with partitions the se)f is in, together wid1 others who have it in them. The family may be imagined as a web, a flower, a tomb, a prison, a castle. Self may be more aware of an image of the family than of the family itself, and map the images onto the family. 'Family' space and time is akin to mythic space and time, in dtat it tends to be ordered round a centre and runs on repeating cydes. Who. what, where. is the centre of the

family? According to one description:

'My family was like a flower. Motber was the centre and we were the peta1s. When I broke away. mother felt that she h:td lost an arm. They (sibs) still meet round her like tha.t. Father never really comes into the family in that sense. ' This family is represented by an iluage of an object, the function of whi(;h is to convey the experience of being part of a ttegetatil'e structure.

6

THR F.o\MIL Y AND THE

fAMILY

INTERNALIZATION

"Internalization· means to map 'outer· onto "inner'. It entails the transference of a group of rdations constituting a set (with a number of operations within the set becween elements of the set, products remaining in the set) from one modality of experience to others: namely from perception to jmagination, memory, dreams. We perceive something in our waking life; we ren1embcr it; then we forget it; we dream of something with different content but similar structure; we remember the dream but not the original perception. From this and other kinds of internalization, some patterns recur in our reveries, dr~ms, imagination, fantasy. Counter-patterns may be set up in imagination against those in :&ntasy. Scenarios of dramatic sequences of space-time relations between ele111:ents undergo transformation (e.g. towards wish-fulfil1ing or catastrophic outcomes) as they recur in the different modalities. We may try to act upon our wish- or fear-fulfilling imagination of which 've become aware only by suffering the effects of such action. Dostoevsky depicts Raskolnikov's family in the interplay of his memoriess dreams, unconscious fanusy, imagination, and in his actions in relation to actual others. While trying to be what he imagines, he enacts instead his fantasy pattern ofhis •family', traceable through his dreams. memories, reveries, and physic.1l experiences &om ...vhich the 'he' that is doing things in this world is largely dissociated.1 Thus many processes are subsumed under the one word 4 internalization.' These all entail transition or modulation from one mode to another. l

Sec Laing {1¢9).

7

ESSAYS

To summarize: \Vhat is internalized are not objects as such but patterns of relationship by intemal operations upon which a person develops an incarnate group structure.

TRANSFOR.MA'riON AND EXTBRNALIZA.'tiON

(PROJECTION) 1

This internal group may condition, more or less, a person s relationship to himsel£ Triadic re1ationships a.re collapsed into se1f-self relations. An adult feels like a child trying to reconcile two 'sides' of himself, pulling him in opposite directions, experienced perhaps as good or bad, as male or female. even physically, on right and left sides of the body: he tries to put ideas together, but an intemal third party intervenes, and so on. These internal self-self relations are as varied as actual family systems. Even when the 'family' does not become a major means of relating or not relating to one's 'selC, one is oneself changed to some extent through having such a group inside. Some seem so to depend on such group operations to structure their space and time that, without them, they feel they would not be able to keep themselves together. A young man teels his life has come to a stop. He is preoccupied by the conflict between East and West, the cold war, the balance of terror, tedmiques of deterrence, one

wnrM, the impossihility ofdivorce, the need h1r c.oexistence, the apparent impossibility of coexistence. He has a mission to find a solution, but he feels hopeless, and paralysed. He docs nothing, but feels crushed by his responsibility for the destruction he feels is inevitable. The structural clements of his preoccupations - conflict, 8

TH.E fAMll Y AND THE • fAMJL y'

the cold war, emotional divorce, balance of terror, need for coexistence - resemble those in the rebtionship between his parents. But he dors not see these resemblances. He imists tlut his preoccupation with the world situation is not only entirely

justified by objective::

factl:l

but t::nt.irdy

bal:lcd on them.

The

world situation is a fact and thousands of people come frcm families like his. therefore there is no connection. A married woman dreams her husband makes .flagrant love to a younger woman in front of her while she is terrified to show any jealousy. Ifshe shows she is jea1ous she may be punished. She links this to her concern about a current affair of her husband. But she does not see any connections between an early weaning situation, sc:dng mother-father making love, mother (to whom she likens husband) and younger sister together, and a taboo in the family against any 4bad' feeJjngs or jealous action to break up exclu